Girija's last hurrah
Leaning out over
The dreadful precipice
One contemptuous tree. -WH Auden

In the morning, you can see vapour rising from the surface of Phewa Lake. The sun penetrates the morning mist, and the Valley of Pokhara finally comes to life. Machhapuchhare looms, incredibly high in the sky, it is so clear and near you want to reach out and touch it. By afternoon, there is a crisp winter breeze wafting over the lake from the forest on the far bank. The mood brings back the innocence you thought you had lost long ago in the dreary journey of life. As evening falls, the shadows of the surrounding hills lengthen across the valley floor absorbing the darkness. Then the moon rises, and the snowy flanks of Annapurna glow in the dark with an unearthly luminescence. Pokhara is magical anytime of day, anytime of year.

And it is in Pokhara that the Nepali Congress' own political Kumbha Mela is being held at a time when the ruling party faces serious challenges of internal rift within, and a challenge to parliamentary democracy by forces without. For the sake of the party and the nation, the Nepali Congress has to come to grip with itself and the nation's problems.

But since politics is about power, Pokhara too will see the war for party leadership erupt openly once more. Girija Prasad Koirala will be trying to ruthlessly steamroll dissidents. Sher Bahadur Deuba and his band of rebels have publicly announced that he wants at least one of Koirala's jobs, and he has refused to accept defeat in the no-trust vote two weeks ago. The party constitution is expected to be amended to elect half the central committee members from a national constituency of general convention members, but Deuba's regional hold over the party apparatus in the mid-west and far-west regions of the country will not be enough to foil Koirala.

That amendment is likely to be the most important concern of Nepali Congress general convention representatives from all over the country when they assemble this weekend in Pokhara. Koirala has declared in an interview that he does not need more than "two or three years" to groom a successor. Pokhara is the best place to make that announcement, where he will have a receptive audience with his hardcore supporters heavily outnumbering the rebels. (The representation-arithmetic has been carefully manipulated that way by his cousin and hatchet man, Sushil Koirala.)

On the other hand, Deuba and his vocal fellow-travellers, Khum Bahadur Khadka and Bijaya Gachhedar, will make sure that it's not a cakewalk for the Koirala dynasty. They know this is their final chance to prove their relevance in a party that has functioned more like a platform thus far, but is likely to acquire the semblance of an actual political party in Pokhara.

Nepali Congress leaders like to think that theirs is a mass-based party. What they don't say is that it is so by necessity. When it was underground and functioned in a hostile environment, ad-hocism was the only way to run it. The party can't afford to run that way now. Transparency, accountability and openness are the new principles of the Tao of Political Management. And political parties first need to be democratically governed if the country is to be democratically governed too.

The Pokhara convention should also re-examine the role and function of Nepali Congress party in the country's rapidly worsening circumstances. When it was spearheading a revolution, the centrality of party leadership was quite logical. You don't fight a war without a general whose orders are carried out without question. Evolutionary methods are better suited for more settled times. Evolution depends on creativity, adaptability and flexibility. This means a party needs an internal structure where dissent is managed, not squashed. The party must therefore learn to place more emphasis on the management ability of its leaders. When half the central committee members come from direct elections, all party leaders aspiring for a national role would like to be elected rather than selected. In a democracy, elections give more legitimacy than selections. But elections do not always send the best managers into positions of power, and so the internal structure of the party needs to be re-designed for efficiency.

Nepali Congress stalwarts frown upon the dictatorial ways of cadre-based parties, but there is nothing wrong in learning from them the lesson of being organised around shared values and norms. This makes everybody respect the rules of the game. When there are elections for leadership, and that will be more often in the future, the winner will still take all. What they need to remember is not to leave losers behind. There can be no winner without at least one loser, so the rules of the game require that the loser be given due importance as well.

In elections everywhere, the loser shows the grace of congratulating the winner. The reason why Koirala and Deuba could not show even half as much maturity, despite being in the same party, is that Nepali Congress hasn't designed its organisation to accommodate dissent while coping with change.

Considering that the convention takes place every four years, and octogenarian Koirala is asking for three more years, Pokhara will probably be his last hurrah. History will perhaps be kinder to him than his critics have been so far, but we will remember him better if he succeeds in kick-starting the institutionalisation of his party.

Delegates to the General Convention of the Nepali Congress share a bigger responsibility than perhaps they themselves realise. It concerns us all, because internal matters of a ruling party are not internal at all-they assume national importance. A location as grand as Pokhara deserves momentous and historic decisions. If the Nepali Congress fails to rise to the occasion, they will have no one to blame but themselves.